Related articles

Almost 20 years after the the world's worst nuclear disaster, Helen
Womack ventures into "the zone".

It all started with the Kid of Speed. The Orange Revolution
played its part as well. Suddenly, I was off on holiday to
Chernobyl. The dead zone around Chernobyl, site of the world's
worst nuclear accident, is probably the last place on Earth to
which a sane person would choose to go for rest and relaxation. But
it is fascinating, beautiful even, and an experience I'll never
forget. If I were writing a postcard, it would say: "Having a great
time in Chernobyl. Wish you were here."

Ukraine has been a happening place since Ruslana, dressed like a
warrior, won the Eurovision Song Contest last year. Western
Europeans laugh at the kitsch of the contest, but eastern Europeans
take it very seriously, seeing participation as a sign of
acceptance in their new European home. Now that the Orange
Revolution, culminating in the election of the reformist President
Viktor Yushchenko after widespread protests against corruption, has
put Ukraine squarely on the map, tour operators are expecting a
tourism boom.

In its way Kiev, or Kyiv, as the Ukrainians say, is as
picturesque as Prague or Budapest. For now, it is also a lot
cheaper. The city is a panorama of gorgeous golden-domed churches.
One of the best months to visit is May, when the chestnuts and
lilacs are in bloom. If you go to the Kyiv-Pechersk cave monastery
and take in the adjacent World War II memorial complex with its
giant silver statue of the grieving Mother, you can see Ukrainian
history from the 11th to the 20th century at a single sweep. As for
the night life, in the (northern) autumn there was no need to go in
search of clubs as the main thoroughfare, the Khreshchatyk, was one
continuous orange street party.

But what to do with my free day in Kiev? I was haunted by the
Kid of Speed; I could not get her out of my mind.

"Elena" is a biker who zooms down the abandoned roads of the
Chernobyl zone on her Kawasaki and describes her adventures on her
website (www.kiddofspeed.com). She waxes lyrical about the peace of
the countryside, left to nature since the residents were evacuated
after the accident on April 26, 1986.

I wanted to ride pillion with her and see the deer and white
hares that have inherited the land from the humans. But Elena
detests journalists and refuses to give interviews.

Her website says: "Her words have definitely made the world
think about this piece of forgotten history. I have seen every
request from news agencies around the world, begging for
interviews. Elena wanted nothing to do with these interviews.

"Did she do it [her biking and writing] for fame, notoriety or
even money? Or did she do it to bring attention to a forgotten
region? Read her words and decide for yourself."

As one of the hated acrobats from the media circus, I was stuck.
Stuck, that is, until I found a small business run by a former
Chernobyl worker who organises tours to the zone.

Chernobyl External Services deals mainly with foreign
specialists going to conferences, but it will also get out the
white minibus and roll out the red carpet for the curious
layperson. If there are 20 people to fill the bus, then the cost is
only $US60 (about $80) each. It says that on a short visit to
Chernobyl the danger from radiation is now no greater than from
flying in an aircraft.

To enter the 30-kilometre exclusion zone that was thrown around
the nuclear plant

after the accident and is still in force, visitors need
permission from the SBU, the Ukrainian successor to the Soviet KGB
(allow five days for the paperwork to be completed).

The tour leader, Sergei Akulinin, works with good humour and
military precision. "See you at the bus in eight-and-a-half
minutes," he jokes. Not eight, not nine, but eight-and-a-half.

On the eve of the tour, you go out from Kiev to Slavutich, the
new town that was built for nuclear workers after the accident made
their old town of Pripyat uninhabitable. It is a journey of 186
kilometres to the north. Slavutich, with a population of 25,000, is
like a model of the old Soviet Union, as different Soviet republics
donated its various quarters in the Armenian building style, the
Russian style, the Ukrainian style and so on.

Dinner is in a converted bomb shelter, now a restaurant with
nautical themes called Nautilus. The wall decorations hint at the
Great Barrier Reef. Trout is on the menu, not locally caught. The
drinking water is bottled. Accommodation is in the
more-than-adequate three-star European Hotel, originally built by
Finns to be the town hospital. The tour starts at 7am sharp.

Briefing me for the tour, Akulinin took me to the Slavutich
Cultural Centre with its explanatory exhibition and memorial bells.
The diagrams of pipes and turbines could only be of interest to a
specialist, but I was moved by the sight of 30 faces staring from
photographs. These were the first victims, who died from massive
doses of radiation straight after the accident, which happened when
an experiment in one of the four reactors went wrong. On another
wall was the face of Viktor Bryukhanov, the then director of
Chernobyl, who was blamed for the tragedy and jailed for 10
years.

"It was not an atomic explosion but a heat explosion," Akulinin
made clear. Nevertheless, radioactive dust from the ruined reactor
was carried on the wind over a wide area of Ukraine and into
neighbouring Belarus and Russia. The communist authorities failed
to warn the population immediately - May Day parades went ahead in
Kiev - and it was Sweden that first alerted the world to the
disaster.

The death toll has now run into thousands and incidences of
thyroid cancer and leukemia are high in the area. Hundreds of
thousands of people, including army conscripts, were involved in
the clean-up and all of these people potentially face illness and
premature death. An exact toll will never be calculated.

Although Akulinin and fellow former nuclear colleagues maintain
that Chernobyl, with its three undamaged reactors, could have been
a viable station if modernised, Ukraine's then president, Leonid
Kuchma, bowed to European pressure and closed the complex in
2001.

Which was why I was astonished to start the tour the next
morning by commuting on an electric train with hundreds of workers
from Slavutich to the mothballed power station. Far from being a
ghostly scene, it is a hive of activity, as the workers have to
maintain the metal sarcophagus that seals the damaged reactor and
keep an eye on the others.

The route to Chernobyl from Slavutich lies through the territory
of Belarus, which is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko. Because I did
not have a visa to enter Belarus, I went on the train with all the
sleepy workers, who are not checked by the border guards. Viktor,
the driver of the white minibus, took my luggage over the Belarus
border and was to meet me at the station, back in Ukrainian
territory.

The train passed through a landscape of pine forests and
rusty-coloured marshes. Storks' nests and bunches of mistletoe
decorated the dark skeletons of the deciduous trees.

The workers poured out onto a platform enclosed with corrugated
iron and trudged down a plastic-floored corridor to machines that
checked them for radiation.

Then they changed into the clothes they keep for work -
turquoise jackets with black suits underneath - so as not to spread
contamination back home. And off they went on buses to the
administrative section or other parts of the station. They are
happy to do this because the wages at Chernobyl average 1700 hryna
(about $500) a month, which is good pay by Ukrainian standards.

The "dosometer" pronounced me clean and I was whisked off to the
Sarcophagus Viewing Centre, where you can watch a video and see a
brilliant model of the inside of the wrecked fourth reactor while
looking out of a wide glass window at the real thing. For some
reason I had expected a dome, but the sarcophagus, built to last
for 30 years, looked more like a big grey roof.

In elegant English, Yulia Marusich explained that the
sarcophagus was unstable and plans were being drawn up to replace
it, as the plutonium and other elements in the reactor would be
lethal for centuries.

Marusich, originally a teacher, said she had come to Slavutich
from the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod because it was easier to
get housing here. She said she had a daughter who was healthy; on
the subject of her own health she was more guarded. I could have
talked to her for longer - the human side interested me more than
the technical one - but Akulinin was looking at his watch.
Eight-and-a-half minutes had already more than passed.

Next stop was the ghost town of Pripyat, abandoned in the days
immediately after the accident.

The silence was eerie. Akulinin stood outside apartment block
number 34 Lesya Ukrainka Street and pointed to his old flat, number
83, on the third floor. He sighed. "My wife and I used to push our
son's pram up this alley. Our youth is here." Stray dogs barked. We
thought it wise to move on.

The air smelt sweet after the car fumes of Kiev. Blue jays
flitted in the bushes. In the absence of people, the streets and
countryside around were completely free of litter. The red rose
hips and black wolfberries looked a normal size. Akulinin admitted
that after the accident, monster pine cones had appeared and the
needles of the pine trees had grown the wrong way round, but said
nature had gradually righted itself.

I had not seen Elena, the Kid of Speed, on any of the roads. Nor
had I seen any animals, although Viktor said the forests were full
of wildlife.

We drove on to the town of Chernobyl, an old settlement with a
white, blue and yellow Orthodox church and little cottages, painted
white in the traditional Ukrainian style. Here specialists from the
Ukrainian Ministry of Emergencies work 15 days on and 15 days off,
studying and cleaning up the zone. We lunched royally in

their canteen on borscht (beetroot soup) and pampushki (doughy
bread balls) and chicken schnitzels - not chicken Kiev but chicken
Chernobyl, Akulinin said. From the taste, at least, there was
nothing wrong with it.

Mykola Dmitruk, the information officer, spoke like a
machine-gun with statistics on the state of the area nearly 20
years after the disaster. For an audience of specialists, his talk
would have been first class. He said scientists were still not sure
how safe the Chernobyl zone was and, personally, he did not
recommend a visit for ordinary tourists, although Ukraine was a
free country and the authorities could not stop visitors coming if
they wanted.

"The tour operators include a day at Chernobyl," he said.

"Twenty to 30 people sign up but when Day Zero comes most of
them decide to stay in Kiev. We get one or two people coming.
Mostly they have an interest in ecology or they are retired atomic
workers themselves."

He seemed to know all about the Kid of Speed as well. He said
her stories of biking in the zone were a "hoax" because she could
not have done that without official permission. Elena may have made
a visit as a member of a group. The photos on her site were old and
had been published before. Nevertheless, they had raised awareness
of Chernobyl, he said.

Our last stop was the village of Ilyntsi, once home to 100
residents, now nearly deserted except for a few elderly people who
returned because they did not settle well after evacuation to other
regions of Ukraine. Up a lane, some men were cutting wood. In the
yard of one house, clean washing was hanging on a line. We rang the
bell and were invited into the home of Galya Pavlovna.

Weeping, the old woman, originally from southern Ukraine,
explained how she had married for a second time and ended up coming
to the zone with her new husband. Then he had died and she had been
left in what she called an "alien" place with few social services.
As a parting gift, she pressed on me a pillowcase decorated with
Ukrainian embroidery. To my shame, I would take this through the
"dosometer" with me when I departed.

Dusk was falling and we said our goodbyes. Along the empty
roads, we headed out of the zone. Pine trees flanked us on both
sides. The light was failing but in the woods I fancied I saw the
flash of a white hare. On the road ahead, I fancied I saw the
streak of a lime-green Kawasaki jacket.

MORE INFORMATION

International airlines fly direct to Kiev or there is an
overnight train from Moscow. To book a trip to Chernobyl, contact
Sergei Akulinin on chvs@slavutich.kiev.ua.

Page Tools

1124562907092-theage.com.auhttp://www.theage.com.au/news/russia/a-day-in-the-halflife-of-chernobyl/2005/08/24/1124562907092.htmltheage.com.auSydney Morning Herald2005-08-27A day in the half-life of ChernobylHelen WomackAlmost 20 years after the the world's worst nuclear disaster, Helen
Womack ventures into "the zone".TravelWDestRussiahttp://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/08/29/chernobly_wideweb__430x279.jpg